The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

  Sometimes, we see individual boards and forums going down, erased. A few last-second messages go out now and then, declaring, “ISec is here.” I can picture the heavy hand of Karla and others like her desperately throwing out their nets and chains, bringing in individual cells and interrogating them, trying to catch more. They might requisition aid from the police, they might call in every Enforcer and Behavioralist they can, but there just are not enough of them.

  It takes time for even the most powerful psychic to tear free the secrets from someone’s head.

  Based on the rate at which information is being put out on the Network and the rate at which it is erased, Susan and I estimate that for every Archivist or fresh recruit that is caught, at least two fresh crewmen are successfully recruited.

  Barrens is a wolf snapping at the bars of his cage, pacing, pacing.

  We cannot seem to sleep, despite our exhaustion. We pace, and talk.

  “Dempsey.” Hana.

  Yes?

  I know Archie is spread throughout the whole system. But is it still yours? Can you take full control, if you have to?

  I wish I knew. I try to explain my theories about Archie. I try to make Barrens understand. I do not think anyone can control Archie anymore. It is AI. It chooses to follow, or not. Something in the combination of my deliberate design and the accident of the data fragments from the Builders gifted my data-mining agent with more and more self-modifying, self-evolving complexity. That day in the park when we celebrated Barrens’s birthday, it was already starting to change. By the time we viewed our local copies of the alien memory that night, Archie was being born on the Nth Web.

  “Just great,” Barrens murmurs, bitter. “We have to convince your program too!” How are we going to talk it into helping only us? Can it be reasoned with?

  I swallow the lump in my throat. “It will take time to study Archie.”

  If you had to, could you shut it down?

  I don’t know. I just don’t know. And I have to be careful when studying it. If it feels threatened, there is just too much that is unknown. Human culture has hypothesized about how a true artificial intelligence might behave, but no one knows with any certainty; there’s never been anything like Archie before. I don’t think even the Builders had something like it, or we would have come across it in the Nth Web.

  That is not what he needs to hear.

  Barrens gives it to the others the next morning. “You still with me?”

  “We are,” they chorus.

  “Then this is what we’ve got. We’re going to stop Archie … Argus. We do that, and ISec might be able to get on top of this. Any other ideas?”

  They shake their heads. At least they don’t look lost anymore.

  We divide up the tasks and begin.

  From then on, Susan keeps her eyes on the chatter on the Nth Web. She gets her own cubicle with a terminal, in the corner next to the kitchen.

  Off in his clinic, Gregory continues his studies on the biological samples left of Meena. When Thorn called, the others rushed off, and they did not bother with her remains or take along the equipment the scavenging party scrounged up for him. He has a proper lab now, with a quantum tunneling microscope, gene sequencers, protein assay kits …

  He says he is close to something major. Barrens is afraid that if we ask him to stop, he too will take off for the growing movement.

  Gregory is not much of a programmer anyway.

  Bullet, Tommy, and Barrens help me study Archie. We take notes on wired-only tablets—unsure just how much Archie can understand. We arrange the rest of the terminals along a semicircle, facing inward, so that anyone can stand up and stretch and see what the rest of us are up to.

  As Archie is not a single program, or even a population of uniform copies of the same program, this is not straightforward.

  The only reason it is still possible to study Archie is that its subunits still respond to the legacy commands of the ancestor programs I originally designed. I had expected that the changes of the swarm as it spread and self-optimized would cause problems, which is why I worked debugging functions into it to see which nodes on the Network a particle had spread to, and what the current state of the code of that specific copy was. I should have suspected something when we never needed to fix anything. No program ever launches so smoothly.

  I get thousands upon thousands of unique feedback reports when I issue the survey command. The data is collected into its own database that I’ve written functions for to map the geographic spread of the data-miner across the Nth Web. We cobble together a cladistics function to graph the evolution of the different subtypes, grouping them according to the relative similarities in their code, a tree with the original ancestor at the root and steadily more distant children as one climbs up through the branches.

  It is more similar to a genetic study of subspecies spread across geography and time than it is to software engineering.

  On our desks, maps of the Network are lit bright, color-coded section by section according to the largest subpopulations of relatively similar particles. We can select a single particle or a group at a time and open them. The actual lines of written programming that compose them are decompiled and the differences automatically compared and highlighted in developer frames that we can scroll through. The notes, observations, and comments we put into the map are shared among the rest of us automatically.

  The first side-by-side comparisons between the original code and the current generation are disheartening. The polymorphisms—the code variations of its instruction set—are vast in number. I purposely avoided true genetic/memetic algorithm strategy. All the differences should happen in only two modules out of the original five that compose each particle: the part that assembles the query results into data structures, and the part that handles the signaling between particles. The extra communications that Barrens added makes for a sixth that should not have changed either. But there have been code mutations in all of the modules in all of the particles we sample. Functions that used to do one thing have been moved, copied, and altered to do completely different tasks. Data types have been altered. Loops were added, changed, or deleted.

  We strain our eyes over displays full of diagrams trying to trace the critical path of the changes between Archie as it is now and the far simpler data-miner I programmed the year and a half before.

  Everyone pushes as hard as he or she can, staring at line after line of program text and a mess of vertices and edges representing comparative maps of the deletions, translocations, and insertions that have happened within the digital equivalent of the chromosomes inside Archie’s cells. We eat ration bars instead of proper meals. There is no time to cook or clean or do laundry. We nap and eat at our terminals, leaving only to take care of biological needs that won’t wait for us.

  It is apparent that this is beyond the boys. It is mostly beyond me too. I have had one machine learning class over my whole life, and this would be difficult for a specialist.

  Little by little, the shape of Archie becomes visible. Not a clump of clumps at all. From the pattern of the signaling between the units and the comparison of the sample particles we’ve examined, the many groupings have become specialized by function. Some scan a specific type of database. Some retrieve a specific type of data. Some gather the results. Some assemble the results. And they are all controlled by something else, which means a central subset does the controlling.

  Archie has a body, eyes, arms, and, even if we haven’t come across a single copy that has those control functions yet, a brain. And a nervous system to connect them all.

  Bullet perks up. “At least we have an idea of what we can go for!”

  “How the fuck are we going to find every single Analytical Node that’s got one of the brain particles out of the hundreds of thousands scattered across the ship?” Tommy moans.

  It goes back to the main reason ISec could not stop Archie. The AI is too spread out.

  “We could try—”
/>   From the corner, we hear Susan jump to her feet, sending her chair clattering to the ground. She walks over to us, chewing her nails. Dark semicircles are sunken under her eyes, and her tawny mane of hair is a tangled mess. She whispers, “We’re running out of time.” She presses her fingertips to her temples and transmits the most recent events and her current assessment. She acts as a conduit between us and the newsfeeds.

  Thorn’s propaganda people have made their next move and released another carefully crafted packet.

  Visions of the City of the Dead, and the demise of Gomez (presumably from some member of his team who managed to escape but did not run into us), and the battle of the Enforcers against the monster join Meena’s gruesome death in creeping across the crew’s consciousness. Sparks of truth fly faster and farther through the Nth Web. Information Security programmers and Behavioralists pull in additional resources from other branches and departments to track down these illicit boards and shut them down. There are arrests and Adjustments, outright memory and personality erasures, but Information Security cannot catch them all.

  Without a word, Barrens pushes back from the terminal, skids back on his chair, and stalks away. He drives his fist through the heavy dining-room table behind our setup, reduces it to splinters.

  Incidents of vandalism and random violence pick up across the Habitat. The Archivists foment discontent, spread rumors, talk to everyone willing to listen. As large as the Noah is, it is still a closed space, and dark emotions are contagious, dangerous stressors. Word of the Archivists as an organization, as a cause, is in the thoughts of many.

  Another day vanishes as we struggle closer to understanding Archie.

  Tommy slaps the arms of his chair. “I got something.” He spreads his arms wide, makes his find available to all our terminals.

  He has found a grouping of program components with immense blocks of dense code. They have replaced what were originally minor code blocks regarding unit conversion and dates. They are almost undecipherable, interspersing giant loops of data structures passing information back and forth with the Builders’ language, math, and logic.

  Bullet pumps one fist. “Are these it? The control subset?”

  He visibly droops when I check the Network map and shake my head. These are the most complex and evolved subunits we have found so far, but the signal pattern to and from them is wrong. It’s not the control-cluster set; they’re too isolated, communicating mostly with each other rather than acting as the hub.

  I run another debugging command to see what these subunits have been assembling. From the parts that aren’t in an alien language, I see material extracted from psychology texts, Behavioralist manuals, Keeper guidelines, case studies.

  “I think they are studies of human interactions. Archie’s thoughts about people.”

  It could take a thousand specialists entire lifetimes to understand Archie.

  Someone yawns. It’s contagious, and everyone yawns. My neck is killing me. I desperately need a shower. “Look, we’re burning out. Let’s take a break. Maybe eat something decent for a change.”

  The others stumble off. Barrens and I remain.

  I tell Barrens my real assessment.

  He throws up his hands, lights up a cigarette, and takes a few long draws before downing half a glass of mead drawn out of Bullet’s still. “We’re fucked.” He stands there blowing smoke rings and watching them disperse. Hana, what would happen if you just ask Archie to stop responding to Thorn and the other cells? It likes you. Would it do what you ask?

  I don’t know if it can even understand a request like that yet. Archie is no ordinary distributed program; it’s got complex substructure connecting all those spread-out parts. I keep calling them particles because of my one machine learning class, but they’re like cells in a living body. I’d have to structure a communication like a virus, so that it could spread to all the nodes where Archie is, so that we get to the bits that compose its mind.

  As I think it, I know it is the only thing we have left to try.

  We share one of the shower stalls in the guys’ locker room. Bullet and Tommy have collapsed in the sleep capsules. At this point, I don’t care what they think or see anyway.

  The hot water helps. But Barrens and I are too tired to rub each other’s back or appreciate the view.

  I pull on someone else’s jeans, someone else’s shirt. The Archivists that left did so in a rush; a lot of their stuff is still here.

  The sight of Barrens struggling into another man’s clothes does get a small smile out of me. No one else is remotely close to his size. I point my fingers, use psi to adjust the cut and fit. I pop open another locker and add the material from the stuff in there to Barrens’s outfit.

  “Thanks.”

  I straighten out his collar. I’ve dressed him in my best attempt at his old policeman’s uniform. I think it will help his mood, and it does. His shoulders and neck straighten up, and his eyes look just a little clearer.

  As we make our way to the kitchen, Susan calls out, “It’s getting bad!”

  She multicasts another report into our heads, keeps the data flowing in real time to us as she reads it off the Nth Web.

  We must look strange, standing there, looking at nothing, hearing nothing, totally still, except for the rapid movements of our eyes behind the eyelids.

  Today, on the feeds, good-looking anchors at last begin to address the issue directly. They claim it is all a hoax. An elaborate scam being propagated by malcontents, just hallucinating young students drugged out on Psyn. Practically an April Fools’ prank, they say. Ted Samuelson and Sarah Harrington look into the cameras, seemingly straight into the audience’s eyes, as they smile genially, calling on all the good citizens of the Noah to be careful of the clever schemes of bored children.

  The ship’s real estate is closed, a fundamentally limited environment. There, it is easy to watch everyone, at work, at home, at play.

  In the realm of pure information, that which is built on top of the alien Analytical Nodes is infinitely more complex and powerful than the devices humans used before. Given how profoundly Archie has been changed by interacting with Builders’ code, the Nth Web too must have changed from what the original Ministry of Information made. It is larger than what the ship needs and what ISec can monitor.

  In a week, there is to be a virtual demonstration. Thousands upon thousands of crew members are planning to attack the public advertising space, flooding the commercial system with fake ads containing all their pent-up indignation and paranoia. They are no longer isolated little flames to stamp out in the dark—a few hundred of the core group, the next, larger ring of fresh recruits numbering a few thousand, and twice that many ordinary people who just want to know. They demand to know.

  The chat rooms are a wildfire of speculation. The Archivists are winning the imagination of the average. They have their message out there. “We are just like you. Aren’t you tired of never knowing anything except what other people tell you is permitted for you?” Meena’s disintegrating face full of confusion and terror has become their rallying symbol. Every crew member on the ship gets a digital packet, the Archivist manifesto. Practically a newsletter. There is talk of change and oppression, and simple one-liners such as “The time for secrets is over” and “How long will you let them lie to you?”

  We unplug from Susan’s thought streams. All of us sit and drink Bullet’s powerful, sickly sweet liquor. Me, Barrens, Susan. Tommy and Bullet stumble back out of their beds, and Gregory shuffles in from his lab and drinks with us.

  Barrens looks at me. “We gotta try something, Hana. Do whatever it takes to get hold of Archie’s functions. There’s no time to find its core; we just gotta go with our best guess. Thorn and the rest of them are turning the Habitat into a powder keg, and they’re fucking around with lit matches. We have to stop this before, well … Shit!”

  The rest of them blink or tilt their heads, purse their lips, confused at the way Barrens is shuddering. Th
ey have never seen him show such a loss of control. “Before what?”

  He swallows hard.

  It is my voice that says, “Before Archie finds the G-0 and G-1 files.”

  The last pieces missing. A sliver of thought flickers in my head. I had guessed that G-0 designation refers to us. If the G-1 indicates our monstrous children … Or something worse …

  “They’re planning to bring the whole thing down, whatever the cost,” Barrens says.

  “And the cost,” my voice fades to a whisper, “could be extinction. For everyone. Total mission failure.”

  The words send them reeling. Our mission is to keep humanity alive. We are it. If we fail, there is no one to help us.

  The others sleep. Even Barrens sleeps. I slide free of his arms after a pointless half hour of waiting and hoping for the refuge of unconsciousness.

  I need a drink.

  Only I am not alone.

  Sitting on the floor next to the doors of the supply room, Gregory is drinking.

  “Ha. Couldn’t shle … sleep … either. Eh?” He tilts his head and peers up at me. He smells foul. But his bloodshot eyes gleam.

  “You’re finished?”

  “Yeah.” He takes a swig of Bullet’s strongest, whiskeylike moonshine. “Yeah, you could say that. We’re all finished, my pretty. People just don’t know it.”

  I consider telling him my theory, about us, and our children. And them, down in the black city.

  He holds up a hand. “Don’t. I know … know too much already. I figured Mincemeat out, doll. I’m sorry. I’m just going to drink until I can’t think anymore.”

  The bottomless despair in his voice, empowered by his subconscious empathic projection, chases me away.

  I think of telling my lion.